


Merle Interlude: Familiar But Not Too Familiar

by Buffintruder



Series: Angus McDonald, Boy Detective [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 13:09:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17244803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buffintruder/pseuds/Buffintruder
Summary: Merle comes to realize how much he could have lost and how much he did.





	Merle Interlude: Familiar But Not Too Familiar

**Author's Note:**

> Set before and during chapter 6 of the main story

Merle had trouble sleeping that night.

Even though he knew that Angus was safe now and had seen him with his own eyes, those hours of stomach-curdling anxiety from when he was missing had left their toll. Despite the amount of relief that had flowed through Merle earlier that night, he now found it hard to relax.

It was a little cliche, but Merle hadn’t realized how much Angus meant to him until he had almost lost him. Sure, Merle had always known Angus was a good kid, despite all the teasing that might suggest he thought otherwise. But part of him still thought of him as that dorky boy he had met on a train.

Somehow, without Merle noticing, Angus had integrated himself into the IPRE family, and not just because Taako was legally in charge of taking care of him.

Angus spent at least one day at Merle’s house each weekend, playing with his kids. He showed up at the lab on slow days, asking them questions about their experiments and begging them for mysteries to solve, and he always went to the IPRE family dinners. If Angus had been truly, permanently gone, Merle’s life would be changed more than a little, and that realization was not a particularly pleasant one to have, given the circumstances.

Even after Kravitz brought Angus back, those thoughts continued to circle around Merle’s mind, ceaseless in their noise, demanding to be considered, even long after Merle had stopped having anything new or insightful to bring to his mental discussion.

It was well into the early hours of the next morning before Merle’s exhaustion finally overcame the tense feelings and dragged him into sleep.

Needless to say, Merle was not pleased to wake up to the irritating bleeping of his phone. All the strength in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep his eyelids fully open at this point, so he turned over onto his front so his flesh arm was closer to his phone and blindly fumbled around on his bedside drawer to grab it. He wanted nothing more in the world than to shut off that racket so he could sink back into that warm sleepy haze he had been so rudely pulled from.

One of his fingers hit the smooth screen, and to his immense relief, the ringing stopped.

“Hey, Merle?” Taako’s stifled voice came out from the phone.

Merle groaned. He hadn’t meant to accept the call. “Whad’ya want?”

“You’re good at forgiving people, right?”

Merle dropped the hand he had been extending to hang up. Taako was better at being open with people than he was ten years ago, but even half-asleep, Merle could recognize that this was a rare vulnerable moment. Whatever was going on was serious, which meant that Merle couldn’t in good consciousness turn Taako away.

“Well, right now I’m forgiving you for waking me up, so I’m pretty sure that makes me a saint or something,” Merle muttered. He yawned and pushed himself up into a sitting position, the cooler air from beyond his covers hitting him like a bucket of ice. “What’s the problem?”

“Uh...” Taako said. “I—well—”

Merle’s brain finally shaped a thought out of the fog that clouded his memory and thinking ability. “Is this about Kravitz?”

“...Yes.”

“Why’re you calling me about this?” Merle wasn’t trying to brush off Taako’s problem, but he wanted there to be a good reason he had been woken up at—Merle checked the clock—seven in the morning. Okay so maybe it wasn’t that early, but after the previous day, he deserved to be able to sleep in.

Taako let out a breath. “I mean, you know. Kravitz lied to me. To all of us. And like, he had his reasons, but it was a pretty big thing to keep from someone. And I don’t even know how to process all this, with what’s been going on with Angus and everything.”

“Well,” Merle said. “Sounds to me, judging by your opening question, you’re at least considering forgiveness.”

“Yeah... maybe...”

“ _ Do  _ you want to forgive Kravitz?” Merle asked. He knew Taako could be petty and hold grudges for ages, but he also knew that Taako’s relationship with Kravitz had meant a lot to him.

There was a long pause. “I think so. I mean, I don’t wanna break up with him over this? Which means I’m going to have to forgive him. But I  _ don’t know how. _ Please tell me, Merle, how you can just stop feeling angry at someone so easily?”

“It’s not that easy,” Merle said. And he had a feeling it would be even harder for Taako than it was for him. In general, Merle was more laid back, and sometimes he wondered if he forgave so easily because he found it hard to stand up for himself. Taako was the opposite of him in that regard. “Forgiveness isn’t really a one size fits all kind of thing either. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you.”

“Right. Thanks for that thrilling piece of advice.”

“It’s not—I still have some helpful tips,” Merle said quickly. He had not signed up to play psychologist from his bed, but he figured since he was already awake he might as well go along. “I think to fully forgive someone, you gotta understand why you’re angry, and why the other person did the thing that hurt you.”

“I…I think I have some ideas,” Taako said, though he didn’t elaborate.

“You have to accept that both things are important.”

“Right. I can do that.”

“And...” Merle tried to think of some more helpful things to say. He knew what worked for him, but he hadn’t tried to define it in a way that would be helpful for other people to hear. “It’s okay if the process isn’t immediate. And make sure he actually deserves forgiveness.”

Merle tended to forgive people whether or not they deserved it, but not holding grudges was one thing; continuing relationships with people who weren’t going to be better was another. Plus it was easier to be protective over somebody else’s emotional health than it was his own.

“I guess... he didn’t lie maliciously,” Taako muttered. “I’ll have to think about it...”

“Great,” Merle said. “Now I’m going back to sleep because it’s honestly too damn early for this. Just because you barely need any sleep to function doesn’t mean we’re all like that.”

“Coward. You’re just afraid to try.”

“Uhuh,” Merle said. He hit the red button on his phone and placed it back on the drawer before Taako could continue the conversation any further. As he shoved himself back under the covers, his mind was already drifting off into to a hazy state of almost-sleep.

...

Merle didn’t bother showing up to work on time that day. With everything that had happened with Angus, he figured Davenport wouldn’t push them to do anything for at least a couple of days. He considered taking the opportunity to skip the whole day, but it wasn’t like he had anything better to do, really. At least working made him feel useful.

When he arrived, Magnus was setting something up in the main lab, and a light in the office indicated that Davenport or Lucretia was probably there as well.

Merle was passing through the main lab toward the greenhouse to check on his plants, when a detail struck him. He stopped next to Magnus. “Wait isn’t today Thursday? Shouldn’t it be your day off?”

Magnus glanced up. “What? Oh yeah. I just wanted to be doing something, you know?”

“Yeah...” Merle said and continued on his way. It wasn’t like the IPRE stuck very closely to their agreed upon hours of work in normal times, and Magnus tended to react to stress by keeping himself occupied.

Merle went around, checking that all the watering systems were working properly and that no plant was wilting or diseased. Once he was finished, he returned to the main part of the building to grab some some instruments to take a few soil measurements.

Magnus was still in the main lab, but he was talking on the phone rather than working on his experiment.

“Right! This is awkward!” Merle heard Magnus say.

“There’s nothing like pointing out a situation is awkward to make it better,” Merle couldn’t resist saying. Magnus jumped, jerking the phone from his face, and Merle could see that the name on the screen was Angus’s. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, good you’re here! I think we’re going to need some magic,” Magnus said.

“Who’s ‘we’?” Merle asked suspiciously. Magnus was wearing his plotting face, and Merle didn’t trust it a bit. It seemed a bit soon after Angus’s kidnapping to be planning pranks, but everybody had their own coping methods. That didn’t mean that he wanted to be dragged into it though.

“Oh, you know,” Magnus said in an overly casual tone that Merle instantly distrusted. “Me, Angus, and a couple of old coworkers we were magically made to forget about.”

Merle blinked. “Fair enough,” his mouth said, though his mind felt a million miles away, trying to process the thing that Magnus had just said. It seemed like a weird thing to say as a joke, and Merle knew it wasn’t Magnus’s goofing tone. His heart was starting to beat faster, and he wasn’t even sure why. He wanted to brush it off as just another one of the many strange things the IPRE frequently said, but there was something that told him he couldn’t.

“What do you need the magic for?” he asked instead because that was easier to focus on.

“To help you remember we exist,” said someone on the other end. His voice was gravelly, on the verge of familiarity, like someone who sounded like a celebrity that Merle couldn’t quite remember the name of.

“Though with that old man brain of his, I’m not sure that’s possible for Merle,” another person muttered, triggering the same sense of almost-recognition.

Magnus laughed, much in the same way he did when any of the IPRE made fun of Merle. It didn’t hurt much those times, but with strangers mocking him and Magnus joining along, Merle felt a wave of disconnect. That feeling of not belonging, of not being wanted, of not deserving a place among his friends, had mostly stopped showing up in the recent years. But at that moment, the reassurance that a decade of being kept around had built was blown away for an instant.

Rather than dwelling on those thoughts, Merle turned to Magnus.  _ Are they for real?  _ he mouthed as the people on the other end introduced themselves as Barry and Lup.

Magnus shrugged and mouthed back, _ I think so? _

“If you really know me, then what’s my favorite plant?” Merle asked out loud.

“Ew, I’d never try to find that out!” Lup said.

“They have a point there,” Magnus said, grinning.

“Okay, I believe you,” Merle said. It seemed like the kind of thing the current members of the IPRE would say to that question. “But for future references, I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite.”

Barry snorted. “I’ll just keep that in mind for the next time we get kidnapped and have our existences erased.”

“Well, you never know!” Merle protested.

“Anyway, they were about to tell me how to fix it before you so rudely interrupted us,” Magnus said.

“Never mind that we were just about to bring you in anyway,” Barry muttered.

“Or any other magic user,” Magnus protested at the same time that Lup said,

“Yeah, or literally anyone else.”

“So what exactly do you need to do?” Merle asked before they could get too carried away with mocking him. If anything was proof that Lup and Barry had once been part of the IPRE, this was it, though it didn’t make him too happy.

“It’s a ritual, and a relatively simple one at that,” Barry explained.

“But it’s never been done before though, right?” Magnus asked. “How do you know it’ll work?”

“Believe me, we paid very close attention to how we were being erased from the rest of the world,” Barry said.

“Then we’ve had five years with nothing better to do than think about how to reverse it,” Lup added. “We were once—and probably still are—among the top researches into bonds and souls and stuff. At this point, the only real way to know if it’ll work is to try it.”

“Lydia and Edward managed to erase us well enough going off all the theoretical stuff we did. I’m sure we have a pretty good idea on how to undo it,” Barry said.

“Fair enough,” Magnus said. “Where do we start?”

Lup began listing all the physical components of the ritual. Since Magnus was writing it all down, Merle didn’t bother with trying to remember it all. A lot of the stuff could be found in the lab, he noticed. And everything that couldn’t was probably available at a grocery store or something.

Barry had been right—the ritual was fairly simple, stripped down to its barest bones. There was stuff to power it and stuff to interact with bonds, but none of that extra stuff that a lot of people stuck on for dramatics or because they didn’t know which compounds were necessary to the function of the ritual.

Someone had told Merle once that you should always stick to the basics in any spell or ritual unless you were trying to show off because there were less chances of messing something up. If Merle really had worked with Lup and Barry in the past, maybe the same person had also told them that. Or maybe  _ they _ were the ones who told him.

“Okay, we can get all of that together pretty quickly,” Magnus said when Lup finished listing the ingredients. “Now, what—”

“Oh wait,” Lup said. “I almost forgot! You’re going to also need unicorn hair, the feathers of a phoenix, and the heartstring of a dragon.”

“What???” Magnus demanded.

“Uh huh,” Merle said, unimpressed. Those kinds of ingredients weren’t the kinds needed for this kind of spell, and nothing about it had been superfluous so far.

“No, not really,” Barry admitted.

“Tattle tale,” Lup grumbled.

“I’d have liked to see Magnus run around trying to find all that,” Merle said, grinning.

Magnus rolled his eyes. “I would have figured it out pretty quickly.”

“Suuuure,” Merle said, mostly because Magnus’s offended face was really funny to watch. Lup and Barry were missing out by not being there in person—if they could even see in their body-less form. They could speak and hear though, so Merle figured they could probably see as well.

“I don’t know,” Barry said. “Magnus figured out that whole bear situation a few years ago much faster than the rest of us.”

Merle’s heart jolted in a weird way. He remembered that incident pretty well, and it felt odd that two people he didn’t know could also remember that. Even though, now that he thought about it, Merle was pretty sure there had been more than five people involved, despite also being positive that only the IPRE had done anything about it. He couldn’t wait until they broke the bond-muffling spell and he wouldn’t have to deal with all these conflicting memories.

“Barry is now my one true friend,” Magnus proclaimed. “The rest of you can suck it.”

“If that’s the case, then how about we continue working on letting you remember me?” Barry said, though Merle could hear the smile in his voice.

He and Lup outlined the rest of the ritual. This part of the process was much more complex and would likely take nearly an hour to complete.

“You have to wait for the power to build up,” Lup explained. “Plus directing it takes a lot of precision, which is why you need that full hour. I trust only Lucretia to do it.”

“What, you don’t think I could?” Merle demanded.

“Do  _ you _ think you could?” Barry countered.

“Probably not,” Merle admitted. He wasn’t great at focusing for long periods of time and his magic wasn’t always reliable. If he were the only option, he would have done his best to help, but Lup was correct in recommending Lucretia for the role.

“Okay, well that’s basically what you need for the spell,” Lup said. “But we can go over this again once we’re there.”

Magnus did a bit where he pretended to have not been paying attention to the spell, which in Merle’s opinion was too similar to Lup adding extra ingredients to the list of components for it to really be funny. Still, Lup and Barry seemed to find it amusing, so at least someone got something out of Magnus’s bad jokes.

They made a few quick arrangements to bring everything into place. Merle could already picture the face Davenport was going to make when they told him about the situation, and he grinned quietly to himself. He was going to give the most confusing and question-sparking explanation, just to mess with him.

“Goodbye, sirs!” Angus said, the first time he had spoken in quite a bit. Merle had forgotten he was there.

“Take care of yourself, Ango. Don’t get kidnapped again!” Magnus said.

Something curled up anxiously in Merle’s stomach at the reminder of Angus’s kidnapping, and he gave Magnus a look. Even though Merle was hardly the most tactful person, even he knew that it was a bit too soon.

Magnus met Merle’s eyes then winced, as if he had just realized what he said.

But before either of them could say anything else, Angus quickly said, “I’ll try!” Then he hung up.

“Well then,” Merle said, as Magnus put away his phone. “I call dibs on telling Davenport.”

“Okay, sure, I’ll tell Creesh,” Magnus said. He grinned. “I can’t wait to see her face!” And then he stood and went towards the office.

Feeling only a little bitter that Magnus had said out loud the thought that Merle had had first, he shuffled along to the lab where Davenport was currently working.

“Hey, Dav?”

Davenport looked up from the vial he was staring at and set the pencil down on the notebook. “Is everything alright?”

There was some residual anxiety left in him too, Merle figured. Normally when any of them interrupted Davenport’s experiments, he just told them to leave him alone.

“Oh, yeah. It’s going fine. Apparently Angus found some souls trapped in jars at Lydia and Edward’s place, and they need you to bring them back to the lab from Taako’s apartment.”

“What?” Davenport frowned at him. “Are they dangerous?”

“Nah, they’re super chill!” Merle said. “Except for the time Lup insulted my memory, but I guess that’s fair since we all did forget about her.”

“What are you talking about?” Davenport said, the crease above the bridge of his nose deepening.

“I guess you’ll have to find out for yourself, won’t you.” Merle grinned and nudged Davenport in the direction of the door.

“Right, sure,” Davenport said, too mystified to even sound irritated. With one last bewildered glance at Merle, he left.

Merle grinned to himself then left to go find Magnus. They had a bunch of materials to collect and some time to kill.

...

It took Davenport about half an hour to return to the IPRE lab with Lup and Barry.

By then, Lucretia had carefully (if somewhat skeptically) drawn the necessary circles and symbols onto the floor with chalk, and Magnus and Merle had piled everything they needed onto a table just outside all that.

“And you’re  _ sure _ they’re telling the truth?” Lucretia was asking when Davenport burst in, a glass jar in each hand.

They looked disappointingly ordinary for things that apparently contained the souls of his former coworkers. Merle felt like he should stuff jam into them and stick them in the back of his pantry.

“Man, it’s good to see this place again!” Lup said. Merle looked carefully at both jars, but although the voice came from their direction, there was no indication that anything about either of the jars had done anything.

“Uh, hi,” Lucretia said, waving awkwardly at the jars.

“Let’s get this started!” Magnus said with his usual urge to dive headfirst into anything and everything.

Merle sort of zoned out as Lup and Barry oversaw the rest of the preparations. This was all very important, he knew, but it also didn’t really require him to do much, and his night of poor sleep was starting to catch up with him. He yawned as his mind drifted sleepily from one thought to another, the world rushing on around him.

It didn’t take long for everyone to double check everything, and then Lucretia was starting the spell, her monotone chanting filling all the spaces of the room. Merle sat on one of the chairs near the wall. He knew better than to potentially distract her by starting a conversation with someone else, even if it was a very quiet one.

Long minutes passed without interruption, and Merle felt his mind wander. He closed his eyes, questions swirling around in his mind about what holes might be left behind when two people’s lives were ripped from the world.

His thoughts grew murkier, and before he knew it, Merle was pulled into wakefulness by a shift in Lucretia’s tone.

Blinking away the haziness, Merle tried to place what was different. The two jars in the middle were as unresponsive as ever. Magnus was sitting at a chair on the other side of the room, his eyes unfocused. Davenport was near him, intently watching the spell’s proceedings. Merle wondered if he had been paying attention the whole time and how he wasn’t bored already. Merle glanced at his watch; it had been nearly an hour since Lucretia started.

 That meant the spell was almost done. As Merle watched, he saw Lucretia glance up at the clock on the wall as she continued to repeat the lines in the same steady pace.

He knew that his memories of Lup and Barry wouldn’t return until the spell was completed, but he still found himself searching his mind for any new information about them that might have shown up. There was still nothing. To Merle, they were still strangers he had spoken once over the phone with.

On the other side of the room, Magnus yawned and stretched and pulled out his phone. Merle watched as he placed it up against his ear and exchanged some quiet words that were covered up by Lucretia’s chanting.

Merle looked back at his clock, watching the seconds tick away. Soon he would remember two people that didn’t currently seem to fit into his life. He would know another first meeting with them. It was bizarre, and he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the fact in a way that felt real. It hadn’t feel like there were any gaping holes in his life while he was living through the past five years, but once he knew something had been missing, how could that time not feel a little hollow, a little empty?

And then suddenly Lucretia stopped, the final vowel hanging in the air like the last guest who wouldn’t leave a dinner party. The room was utterly silent, in shared anticipation.

It wasn’t a sudden thing. The ritual was done, but Merle didn’t feel streams of memory flooding back into his mind. He was the same Merle as he always was.

He frowned to himself. Maybe it didn’t work? Or it just took a moment to settle it? He hoped it wouldn’t take too long. Lup and Barry didn’t deserve to be forgotten by everyone they had ever known. They seemed like nice people. They  _ were  _ nice people, Merle corrected himself. And like a forgotten line in a song lyric that had been bothering him all day, Merle remembered.

_ Of course _ he knew Lup and Barry; how could he have forgotten? It wasn’t so much that old memories were returning as much as it was that they had always been there and he just hadn’t noticed until now.

Blurry spots in his memory that Merle had assumed were due to the passing of time cleared, resolving into a story that made sense for the first time in five years. He didn’t try chasing the individual memories down; there would be time for that later. For now, it was enough to feel the warm familiarity that clustered in his chest when he thought of Lup and Barry.

“Is it... is it working?” Lup asked, her voice too quiet for her loud personality. With that the tense silence was broken.

A small groan from across the room caught Merle’s attention, and he looked up to see Lucretia clutching her head.

“I shouldn’t have tried to remember it all at once,” she muttered, rubbing at her temple.

“Barry! Lup!” Magnus yelled, jumping up in delight. “My dudes!! I remember!”

“It worked!!” Barry cried, and Merle could suddenly picture Barry’s face split apart by a wide grin. It was funny how faceless voices could turn into real people in his mind without Merle having ever seen the person in between.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t have done more before,” Davenport said. Unlike the others, the spell seemed to have left him solemn rather than excited. “We didn’t even think to look for you...”

“Lydia and Edward were  _ good _ ,” Barry said. “It’s not like you could have known.”

“But Angus did,” Davenport pointed out. “He had even less to work on than we did.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Well you know what they say about outside perspectives,” Merle said. “I guess the kid  _ is _ good for something after all.”

“Hey, that’s my nephew you’re insulting!” Lup protested.

There was the smallest moment of confusion before Merle remembered that Lup was Taako’s sister, the knowledge smoothly slotting into place with everything else he knew about the two of them.

“Yeah, well...” Davenport said. He sighed and looked away. Out of the corner of Merle’s eye, he saw Davenport get up and grab a broom to start sweeping up the remains of the ritual. After a moment, Magnus started helping him.

Merle snorted. “The kid’s a brat. Just let me tell you about the time when covered this whole lab in ice.” He grinned fondly to himself, ignoring the weird twinge in his heart that told him he would sorely miss it if Angus wasn’t around to cause little incidents like that.

“It was an accident and you know it!” Magnus called out from where he was starting to scrub away the chalk marks.

“Like you weren’t a dozen times worse when you were a kid,” Lup added.

“You weren’t even around for my childhood,” Merle muttered. This sort of banter had been vaguely familiar without any clear reason why, when he and Magnus had spoken to Lup and Barry over the phone, but now he knew. He hadn’t been able to miss this during the five years of Lup and Barry’s disappearance, but now he retroactively felt sad for all the time he hadn’t spent in their company.

“So what  _ did _ Angus do?” Barry asked.

“ _ Well _ ,” Merle started, grinning even wider. Maybe he should be helping Davenport and Magnus clean up, but he prefered to take advantage of the fact that his friends were back for the first time in half a decade. Filled with affection for their newly returned familiarity, Merle began his tale.


End file.
